Mediation for Manuel Noriega's surrender during the U.S. invasion of Panama was a Vatican diplomatic operation led in practice by Lorenzo Quart, who helped secure Noriega’s surrender and coordinate the fate of those sheltering in the nunciature. Remembered later as a model crisis mission at the Institute for External Works, it also left Quart with the scar beneath his left collarbone that marked the cost of negotiating amid an invasion.

Assignment and Crisis

Within hours of the U.S. invasion of Panama and Noriega’s entry into the Vatican diplomatic mission, Quart arrived on an urgent flight from Costa Rica. His official role was to assist the nuncio, but his actual assignment was to control the negotiations and report directly to the Institute for External Works. He replaced Monsignor Héctor Bonino, an Argentine-Italian without a diplomatic career whose handling of unconventional matters did not have the full confidence of the Secretariat of State.

The nunciature had become a crowded refuge for an improbable collection of people: Noriega, known as Carapiña; a Nicaraguan counterintelligence chief; five Basque members of ETA; a Cuban economic adviser who repeatedly threatened suicide unless he was returned safely to Havana; a Spanish intelligence agent; and three Colombian drug traffickers. Outside, U.S. soldiers ringed the building with barbed wire and barricades and blasted rock music around the clock to wear down the nuncio and those inside. Bonino required the refugees to attend daily Mass in exchange for asylum, producing the incongruous spectacle of political enemies exchanging the sign of peace while Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in U.S.A.” thundered in the street.

Negotiations and the Nunciature Siege

The decisive confrontation came when Delta Force commandos, their noses painted black, attempted to storm the nunciature. Quart stayed on the telephone with the archbishops of New York and Chicago until they secured President Bush’s order halting the assault. The intervention prevented the attempted entry; Noriega eventually surrendered without imposing many conditions.

The operation also arranged the discreet removal from Panama of the Nicaraguan and the ETA members. The Colombian traffickers departed on their own and later resurfaced in Medellín. These outcomes extended the mission beyond Noriega’s surrender: the negotiations had to account for a whole collection of refugees whose presence and destinations carried separate diplomatic risks.

The Secret Evacuation and Its Cost

The Cuban adviser, Girón, was the last to leave. A Spanish intelligence agent, acting at personal risk, tried to get him out in the trunk of an old Chevrolet Impala Quart had rented. The plan depended on a secret agreement, so the American soldier Kowalski did not know about it. Nor was he inclined to make allowances for diplomatic subtleties: despite Quart’s clerical collar and Vatican diplomatic passport, the attempt ended with Kowalski breaking Quart’s shoulder.

Girón spent a month in a Miami jail. He did not carry out his repeated threat to kill himself; after his release, he obtained political asylum in the United States and gave an interview to Reader’s Digest under the title “I, Too, Was Deceived by Castro.” The story thus ends its account of the evacuation with an ironic reversal: the man who had warned that he would not survive unless returned to Havana instead found refuge in the United States, while Quart bore the lasting physical consequence of the failed extraction.

Reputation and Later Echoes

Apart from the broken shoulder, the Panama operation was regarded within the Institute for External Works as a classic example of crisis diplomacy. Quart’s mediation helped secure Noriega’s surrender, stopped the attempted assault on the nunciature, and contributed to the refugees’ departures. Yet its success did not mean that every arrangement held: the rescue of Girón failed at the final checkpoint, and the secret agreement could not protect Quart from a soldier unaware of it.

The episode became part of Quart’s professional history and a measure of the controlled, disciplined identity he presents. The scar beneath his left collarbone recalls the moment when diplomatic credentials and clerical dress proved insufficient protection. Later, an archbishop recalls that Quart had negotiated Noriega’s surrender; for Quart, the mission is not an abstract credential but a precise memory of an improvised operation, an old Chevrolet’s trunk, and a broken shoulder.